The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-love

Introduction: Another Morality Tale?

introduction: another morality tale? L’amour-propre est plus habile que le plus habile homme du monde. —La Rochefoucauld, Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales In the hands of the French moralists of the seventeenth century , Ovid’s Narcissus does not appear as a hubristic and deluded figure but rather as a cunning and perverse passion that can outwit the most reasonable of men. From Madame de Sablé’s Maximes to Pascal’s Pensées, the mot du jour of the moralists was most certainly amour-propre, which translated the Latin amor sui. As inheritors of the texts of the Church Fathers, the moralists appropriated the Augustinian opposition between amor sui (amour-propre) and amor Dei (charité). In the reflections of the moralists, especially in the writings of its most famous spokesman, La Rochefoucauld, amour-propre appears as an unequivocally maleficent passion that must be constantly guarded against. Amour-propre, in La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, was so pervasively discussed and denounced that Voltaire in Le Siècle de Louis XIV 18 Rousseau: Passions of Narcissus wrote: “Quoiqu’il n’y ait presque qu’une vérité dans ce livre, qui est que l’amour-propre est le mobile de tout.” As a child of the eighteenth century, Rousseau was the recipient of a rich and heavy-handed moralist tradition in which the nature and effects of self-love as amour-propre had been well established. Thus, it is not surprising that the young Rousseau , in one of his earliest literary ventures, authored a play, essentially a morality tale, entitled Narcissus, or the Lover of Himself. The only play of Rousseau’s to be performed publicly— for a mere two nights—has never been described as a sophisticated or significant work of theatrical literature. Even Paul de Man, one of the play’s most subtle and generous readers, describes the drama thus: “To a large extent, Narcisse exploits the hackneyed comical resources of vanity.” This early work in which amour-propre is lightheartedly shown to make a mockery of man, a theme that is continued more critically and forcefully in Rousseau’s major theoretical writings, appears to confirm that he remains faithful to the French moral tradition’s condemnation of self-love as vain deceit. Yet, as his readers are well aware, the mature Rousseau deviates from this tradition by refusing to unambiguously condemn self-love as unnatural and harmful to man. Rather Rousseau, who becomes the most renowned defender of the passions, resists the moral and theoretical simplicity of his predecessors and makes an unconventional case, like that of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, by arguing that self-love can and should serve man’s well-being. In Part I, “Rousseau: The Passions of Narcissus,” we undertake to show that Rousseau’s deep and careful consideration of self-love—at two levels—moves away from, although never wholly breaks with, the moralists. In the first chapter, “Man’s Double Birth,” we examine how Rousseau , in a first move, overtly and quite polemically argues for a natural and, hence, healthy notion of self-love that he opposes to a social and malignant form. In Chapter 2, “Regarding SelfLove Anew,” we make the case that Rousseau, perhaps in a less explicit yet no less powerful fashion, undermines the rigorous Another Morality Tale? 19 opposition between a purely good and an entirely evil expression of self-love that he himself had set up. It will be our contention that at this second level of analysis Rousseau, turning even further away from the intellectual naïveté of his predecessors , offers his readers a very complex and historically unprecedented version of self-love, or narcissism. With the publication, in 1775, of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, perhaps his most famous morality tale, Rousseau introduces not one but two distinct types of self-love: amourpropre and amour de soi. In apparent agreement with the tradition , he continues to relegate amour-propre to the place that it had held in French letters by aligning it with “errors of the imagination,” in particular, with vanity or pride. Nonetheless, in a radical departure from the universal condemnation of selflove , Rousseau makes the case that man’s true self-love, which he terms amour de soi, has become, like the statue of Glaucus, disfigured and nearly unrecognizable because of the pernicious in...